You Never Know Your Luck | Page 4

life on a new railway of the
West. His widow had received a pension from the company insufficient
to maintain her, and so she kept boarders, the coat of one of whom her
daughter was now brushing as she sang. The widow herself was the
origin of the girl's slight disqualification for being of that higher circle
of selection which nature arranges long before society makes its
judicial decision. The father had been a man of high intelligence, which
his daughter to a real degree inherited; but the mother, as kind a soul as
ever lived, was a product of southern English rural life--a little
sumptuous, but wholesome, and for her daughter's sake at least,
keeping herself well and safely within the moral pale in the midst of
marked temptations. She was forty-five, and it said a good deal for her

ample but proper graces that at forty-five she had numerous admirers.
The girl was English in appearance, with a touch perhaps of
Spanish--why, who can say? Was it because of those Spanish hidalgoes
wrecked on the Irish coast long since? Her mind and her tongue,
however, were Irish like her father's. You would have liked her,
everybody did,--yet you would have thought that nature had failed in
self-confidence for once, she was so pointedly designed to express the
ancient dame's colour-scheme, even to the delicate auriferous down on
her youthful cheek and the purse-proud look of her faintly retrousse
nose; though in fact she never had had a purse and scarcely needed one.
In any case she had an ample pocket in her dress.
This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most
important person in the story, but because the end of the story would
have been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she
herself was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or
chance that they express the full meaning of the title of this story. As a
line beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial deserter.
Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she had on
more than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean and
low enough to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of
matrimony without its status.
As with her mother the advertisement of her appearance was wholly
misleading. A man had once said to her that "she looked too gay to be
good," but in all essentials she was as good as she was gay, and indeed
rather better. Her mother had not kept boarders for seven years without
getting some useful knowledge of the world, or without imparting
useful knowledge; and there were men who, having paid their bills on
demand, turned from her wiser if not better men. Because they had
pursued the old but inglorious profession of hunting tame things, Mrs.
Tyndall Tynan had exacted compensation in one way or another--by
extras, by occasional and deliberate omission of table luxuries, and by
making them pay for their own mending, which she herself only did
when her boarders behaved themselves well. She scored in any
contest--in spite of her rather small brain, large heart, and ardent
appearance. A very clever, shiftless Irish husband had made her

develop shrewdness, and she was so busy watching and fending her
daughter that she did not need to watch and fend herself to the same
extent as she would have done had she been free and childless and
thirty. The widow Tynan was practical, and she saw none of those
things which made her daughter stand for minutes at a time and look
into the distance over the prairie towards the sunset light or the grey-
blue foothills. She never sang--she had never sung a note in her life; but
this girl of hers, with a man's coat in her hand, and eyes on the joyous
scene before her, was for ever humming or singing. She had even sung
in the church choir till she declined to do so any longer, because
strangers stared at her so; which goes to show that she was not so vain
as people of her colouring sometimes are. It was just as bad, however,
when she sat in the congregation; for then, too, if she sang, people
stared at her. So it was that she seldom went to church at all; but it was
not because of this that her ideas of right and wrong were quite
individual and not conventional, as the tale of the matrimonial deserter
will show.
This was not church, however, and briskly applying a light
whisk-broom to the coat, she hummed one of the songs her father
taught her when he was in his buoyant or in his sentimental moods, and
that was a